I would suggest to capture service availability and stock-outs as separate data elements or even orgunit groups for services, and not as some interpretation of a 0. Then there is no need to capture zeros. Once the data is aggregated up one level all this zero/blank interpretation is impossible anyway. The complete button also gives an indication of wheter data is missing of not. Ola On Jan 11, 2012 9:45 AM, "Knut Staring" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Here in India, the activities of Subcenters differ quite a bit in the > particular services they offer. Therefore, since all use a standard format, > there will almost always be a number of fields that are not applicable. > Because of this, they maintain that 0 is signficant, because it means "Have > the service, but no cases this month", whereas a blank field means "Don't > have the service" in other words N/A. > > Sometimes it can even mean something in-between, like "We normally > distribute Iron tablets, but sometimes we don't have them (blank), and > sometimes we have them but there is no demand (0)". In my view the latter > semantics is quite complicated, and hard to get consistent, but I'm being > told the health workers handle it well. Thus, a typical report can consist > of 50 positive integers, 7 blanks and 20 zeros. > > Since data entry on the mobile is quite cumbersome and zeros also tend to > fill up the database, I would have preferred zeros to be non-significant > and just go with blanks. But then we would lose the above distinction. > > Knut > > > -- > Knut Staring > Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo > +4791880522 > http://dhis2.org > > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-devs > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~dhis2-devs > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > >
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